Abstract: Professor Philip Morrison once described SETI as the ‘archeology of the future’.  That characterization is both complex and immensely profound. We are a very young technology in a very old galaxy; detection of another technological civilization will validate the proposition that it is possible to become an old technology. 

SETI marked its semi-centennial as a scientific exploration in 2010. Now that exoplanets have been discovered in such abundance and diversity, and Earth 2.0 is a reasonable expectation, it seems more relevant than ever to ask the “Are we alone?” question.  What should we be doing to improve our capability to detect intelligent life beyond Earth? 

To date, technology has been our proxy for intelligence, and our searches have concentrated on electromagnetic radiation.  Should we be emphasizing artifacts? Perhaps collaborating with programs now systematically trying to explore our local solar neighborhood to find small bodies on collision courses with Earth?  Is there a case for genomic SETI?  Should we consider other information-carrying particles in addition to photons?  And if we do continue to emphasize EM signals, how do we improve our sensitivity to transient events, and what other portions of the spectrum can we explore?  Is it time to start transmitting instead of just listening?

There are lots of technical questions about how to move forward, but the most difficult question of all may be how do we integrate and support this vast, and potentially long-term endeavor into a world of short-term thinking?  How do we justify continued investment in SETI?  

About the Speaker: Dr. Jill Tarter holds the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.  Tarter received her Bachelor of Engineering Physics Degree with Distinction from Cornell University and her Master’s Degree and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley.  She is a Fellow of the AAAS and of the California Academy of Sciences, where she also serves on the Board of Trustees.  She is passionate about science education and strives to secure funding for SETI research, particularly with the Allen Telescope Array.  Tarter’s work has brought her wide recognition, including two Public Service Medals from NASA.  In 2004 Time Magazine named her one of the Time 100 most influential people in the world.  Tarter was one of three TED prizewinners in 2009, and was a recipient of the Silicon Valley Women of Influence 2010 Award.  Many people are now familiar with her work as portrayed by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact.

Speaker: Shoucheng Zhang - JG Jackson and CJ Wood Professor of Physics at Stanford University

For the past 60 years, progress in information technology has been governed by Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip doubles every 18 months. However, this remarkable trend is drawing to a close, mostly because the electrons that carry current in chips move like cars driving through a crowded marketplace, swerving around obstacles and dissipating too much of their energy as heat. The recent discovery of a new state of matter, the topological insulator, may lead to a new paradigm of information processing, in which electrons moving in opposing directions are separated into well-ordered lanes, like automobiles on a highway. This talk will explain the basic principles behind this amazing discovery.

Shoucheng Zhang was born in Shanghai and received his BS degree from the Free University of Berlin in 1983 and PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1987. He joined the faculty at Stanford in 1993. He is a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators, spintronics and high temperature superconductivity. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Science. He is the recipient of a number of awards including the Guggenheim fellowship in 2007, the Alexander von Humboldt research prize in 2009, the Johannes Gutenberg research prize in 2010, the Europhysics prize in 2010, the Oliver Buckley prize in 2012, the Dirac Medal and Prize in 2012 and the Physics Frontier Prize in 2013 for his theoretical prediction of the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators.